Is This Mind-Controlled Exoskeleton Science or Spectacle? Very good Greg Miller piece on Miguel Nicolelis’ World Cup ambition. It doesn’t inspire confidence when a scientist refuses to talk to a journalist who included critical voices in previous coverage.

How the Syrian civil war is destroying the historic Aleppo pepper. Maryn McKenna on fine form at National Geographic’s new food blog, The Plate.

12,000 yrs ago, a teenage girl fell in a cave, broke her hip, and died. And now, we can sequence her DNA.

I totally agree with Virginia Hughes’ piece on the travails of health reporting. Perhaps we need less of it. Relatedly, this story says that researchers found that journalists do a lousy job of reporting on health studies, when it was actually a journalist who found that out. Ring the irony klaxon!

This is a really clear explainer from Carl Zimmer on “junk DNA” and what it does and doesn’t mean

Scientists, did your paper get rejected? Just call the Times; you could get a front-page splash. And here’s the full referee comment for the rejected climate paper that the Times has inexplicably splashed with.

Jill Abramson, the editor-in-chief of the NYT was unexpectedly fired. Here are some of the best takes on the affair, by Ken Auletta, Emily Bell and Ann Friedman: “In real time, it’s hard to be sure what’s sexism and what’s you.”

“To truly shift social norms, the community has to get involved in enforcing them.” Laura Hudson on banding together to curb online abuse.

Really Ed? The top ten global warming skeptic arguments answered. The information presented in that piece is trite and self serving. I like your writing and mostly respect your work. But frankly you have a bias when it comes to covering the science of climatology. Science is never settled, as so much of your work demonstrates. Yet when it comes to this one branch of science you are willing to throw your entire claim to independent thought to the wind and sign up for the cheering section without a second thought. Almost no one doubts that the earth is warming or that CO2 has some impact. But the question comes down to how much and in what time frame? When we can still have physicists investigating and arguing about the fundamentals of gravity and mass, why can’t other scientists argue about something as complicated and difficult to understand as all the aspects of the climate of an entire planet without someone coming along and resorting to cheap insults like a school yard bully. As Judith Curry says, the problem is a “Wicked Problem”, so attempting to shut down the discussion of the issue with simplistic arguments and calls on “consensus” is just Un-Scientific. There are parts of the problem we understand fairly well. But there are lots of parts we understand poorly and many parts where we may not understand enough to even know what we don’t know. Trying to shut down the discussion and investigation of the poorly understood parts and the unknown parts is not what real scientists are all about. Real scientists are always open to challenging what we know and advancing and refining that knowledge. The belief we have settled a scientific investigation and never need review it again is when we have settled into Dogma, not Science

About Ed Yong

Ed Yong is a staff science writer at The Atlantic. His work has appeared in Wired, the New York Times, Nature, the BBC, New Scientist, Scientific American, the Guardian, the Times, and more. His first book I CONTAIN MULTITUDES—about how microbes influence the lives of every animal, from humans to squid to wasps—will be published in 2016 by Ecco (HarperCollins; USA) and Bodley Head (Random House; UK).

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